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Professor Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, told The Independent that such warmth in the Arctic at this time of year was once virtually unheard of.

“Temperatures of more than zero are really exceptional for this

Professor Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, told The Independent that such warmth in the Arctic at this time of year was once virtually unheard of.

“Temperatures of more than zero are really exceptional for this time of year. It’s remarkable in terms of the way the climate used to be, but over the past six years this is what’s developed,” he said.

It was, he said, the result of a “sudden” change in the jet stream – high altitude winds that circle the globe and have a major effect on the weather.

“When the sea ice retreated in the Arctic Ocean, in summer it led to much warmer air over the Arctic,” Professor Wadhams said.

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Zack Labe, a PhD student studying climatology at University of California, Irvine, tweeted a graph showing the average temperature across the wider Arctic area was below zero and falling towards the end of this year, but then starting to move back up again with “quite an anomalous spike”.

The amount of Arctic sea ice this year has been significantly below the average for 1981 to 2010.